Aura
is the title of Edoardo Tresoldi
’s site specific installation in Paris, within the prestigious Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche. The Italian artist joins Tadao Ando
, ​​Ai Weiwei
and Chiharu Shiota
, who have exhibited their works here in the recent years. Inspired by Neoclassicism and the Italian Renaissance palazzo, Tresoldi has developed a reflection on the passing of time and the transformation of matter, from classical forms to contemporay content, through the concept of architecture in ruins. A suggestion outlined with the construction of two domes, one in wire mesh and one in corrugated sheet metal, a material that he uses here for the first time.

The 8-meter-long ephemeral installations are suspended from the majestic glass ceilings designed by Gustave Eiffel. The relationship between man and architecture is unveiled here through imperfection, in a temporary balance between past and future. Fragments of the past and an integral part of the Western imaginary, between form and anti-form, ruins are imbued with what Walter Benjamin has defined ‘Aura’, “the unique appearance of a distance”, the magical and supernatural force arising from their uniqueness.

The two elegant art installations have an almost identical shape but different physical characteristics. They embody two different sides of architectural history. The wire mesh artwork refers to the soul of the shape, the ethereal dimension of another world. Its subtractive aesthetic, expressed through lightness and the depiction of absence, recalls the spiritualism of nothingness, the nostalgia for the vanished. The one in corrugated metal sheet is, instead, an organic wreck, an empty shell. Same as an abandoned nest, it is a witness to a life born therein before leaving for somewhere else; it relates to the terrestrial dimension, telling the passing of time. Assaulted by the erosion of events, it represents a return of architecture to nature, presenting itself as an elegy of the caducity of matter.